Review | HMLTD – FANGS

Label: Lucky Number

By Charlie Edmonson

HMLTD follow up 2023’s rock-opera ‘The Worm’ with their ÜberGöth, vampiric odyssey ‘FANGS’. An admirable trait of HMLTD, since their inception, is their ability to explore vastly different soundworlds single to single, album to album. This release is no different. In ditching the narrative, symphonic, and comparatively organic sounds of their previous release, they lean more into their electronic dark side. Yet, that hardly sums ‘FANGS’ up.

It sprawls across industrial rock, Victorian popular music, synth pop, cold wave, and hardcore techno. The title references the parasitic nature of late-stage capitalism; its demand to consume, consume, consume, whilst ensuring that our only productive yield is the drive to consume more.

‘FANGS’ opens with ‘What The Hell’, an industrial rock/dance punk crossover. Lyrics like “it makes me feel like 2012 the way she bad like Joseph Kony” are placed alongside “shrink wrapped skeletons the body emaciated, in the front bass the self is decapitated.” Spychalski impresses with his ability to pair meme-culture references with morbid philosophical musing.

‘Umami’ is reminiscent of some of their earlier work like ‘Proxy Love’ but is squeezed into this decidedly savoury aesthetic. With some triggered chords and acidic arpeggiators, the hook – a 2:3 polyrhythmic repetition of “Umami” – is rendered wonderfully ludic in its simplicity.

Although I have praised them for their stylistic imagination, it appears one of my favourite tracks here is one you can most easily put into a box. ‘One Thousand White Horses’ nails a very recognisable bedroom pop cuteness whilst subtly retaining an industrial aesthetic timbrally. ‘Close to You’ is a straight down the middle Motorama post-punk tune and ‘Grab The Crucifix’ festers with its wobbling sub bass and death metal vocals.

‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ submits the piano style of Victorian music halls to ÜberGöthification. Spychalski also manages to draw on poetry chronistically adjacent to the sonics of the track, with lines like “the moon, wet with silver” evoking Romanticism’s obsession with the sublimity of nature. In fact, this is maybe the best lyrical effort on ‘FANGS’, with its refrain summating the thematic thrust of the whole album – “the world is a void punctured by fangs”.

The last track, ‘Sorry For Laughing’, features French goth legends Corpus Delicti. A macabre take on trip-hop, Spychalski and company sing “you make me feel like someone else, thank you for asking, sorry for laughing”. These lines, coupled with the title’s reference to Scottish post-punk band Josef K, induce the Kafkaesque anonymisation inherent in neoliberal capitalism.

HMLTD have always been ambitious, but on ‘FANGS’ they maybe shine the brightest (or darkest) yet. For them to take common aesthetic threads from all these disparate genres, twist them into a cohesive through-line, and somehow retain their very individual sense of batshit insanity is impressive. We constantly hear that genre has been replaced by “vibe” in today’s post-postmodern landscape. It seems few others prove this point as brashly as HMLTD.